Liverpool legend Bill Shankly would not have approved of the club’s current owners’ radical plans to overhaul English top flight football reckons Ally McCoist.
It was revealed on Sunday that the respective owners of Liverpool and old foes on the pitch, Manchester United, were backing ‘Project Big Picture’, a scheme that would see a reduced Premier League of just 18 clubs, the League Cup and Community Shield scrapped and increased influence for the game’s biggest clubs.
Although financial incentives were offered for Football League outfits, the venture, which many other Premier League clubs claim to have had no prior knowledge off, has been widely condemned as being a ‘power grab’ that exploits the game’s lesser lights at a time of great vulnerability for them.
It has also since been reported that Liverpool's Principal owner John Henry and his Old Trafford counterpart Joel Glazer held crisis talks on Monday about how to take their project forward in the face of mounting opposition.
McCoist, who spent most of his career in his native Scotland but had a two-year spell south of the border with Sunderland between 1981-83 and is now a Premier League match summariser and pundit, told talkSPORT : “I’ve got to say I’m really disappointed in Manchester United and Liverpool.
“It looks very much to me that they’re clearly trying to take advantage of the situation for their own benefit, and I just find it really disappointing.
“I think there is encouragement mainly coming from the average football support out there, and so far the supporters groups from the so-called top-six clubs have, to a man, been condemning those plans.
“But I just hate the way the whole thing’s been set up. The big clubs know the teams at the bottom of the pyramid are at their most vulnerable.
“The bottom line is, two of the clubs that are spearheading this proposal, Manchester United and Liverpool, I just think about the great men, and I mean the truly great men, who have put the history behind those football clubs.
“Men like Sir Matt Busby and Bill Shankly, people who optimised those great football clubs.
“I just wonder what they’d be thinking right now, and I don’t think they’d be singing the praises on that particular proposal.”
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